The Daily Shepherd – When things are going badly, it feels so good to have one soft landing

Early May is when the barn swallows return to the barn. The mother birds swoop in and out of the barn aisle busily building their nests in the beams in the barn ceiling and in the barn loft by the sliding doors. This past Saturday was a gorgeous spring morning. The morning sun was blanketing the barn and the surrounding trees and flowers. We decided that it was a good morning to take some farm pictures so we closed the upper barn doors in the loft and took several nice photos.

Later that Saturday, we had a few families at the barn for Youth Ranch activites. As we were riding Peggy in the round pen behind the barn, one of the children said that he heard birds chirping on the ground behind the barn. That certainly seemed odd so we all hushed and listened. We could hear faint, high-pitched sounds coming from the ground behind the barn. I reached down to the area where the sounds were coming from. After digging through some straw that had fallen to the ground, I saw seven tiny birds with their beaks open and necks stretched, calling for their mother. The birds were the size of my thumb and were covered in fuzz.

Apparently, their nest had fallen from the barn loft when we closed the loft doors to take pictures earlier that morning. When the baby birds fell from the barn loft at least 30 feet up, their fall was broken by a glorious hanging geranium plant that we had purchased the week before to celebrate the life of our foundation mare Treveri. The birds lay just to the right of the hanging plant. The plant was covered in straw from the fallen nest.

We took the baby birds immediately to Second Chance Wildlife Center where we were assured that all seven little barn swallows were healthy and would survive to be returned to nature in a few weeks. Awesome!